There is a nice writeup on Lee Stearns' PhD dissertation topic, HandSight, in Terp Magazine this month (link). The article is entitled A New Way With Words and describes our work in enabling blind or severely low vision people read printed text with a wearable finger-worn camera and co-located haptics.[read more]

Congratulations to Matt Mauriello who was just selected as an All-S.T.A.R Fellow for his work on scalable thermography--one of sixteen across the entire Graduate School at UMD. The Graduate All-S.T.A.R. Fellowship honors graduate students who are both outstanding scholars and outstanding graduate assistants. Read more about the award here.[read more]

Our research group is investigating new methods and tools for urban accessibility data collection and analysis. For Summer 2017, we are looking for talented, creative, and self-motivated undergrad research assistants with strong programming skills, technical background and an interest in urban accessibility to work on novel tools and applications for people with mobility impairments.
If you're interested, please follow the instructions here.[read more]

I am deeply honored to be named a Sloan Research Fellow along with my CS colleague Tom Goldstein (that's me and Tom in the picture during the CS department's Sloan celebration). While the Sloan is awarded individually, I truly believe the recognition should be shared more broadly: particularly with my students, collaborators, and mentors who have helped inspire, enable, and enrich my work.
I am also thankful for the support and mentorship from the UMD CS Department and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. I now feel doubly motivated to live up to the esteem of the award (which I will do just as soon as my paternity leave ends)!
Read more at the CS and UMIACS news releases[read more]

We were just notified that MakerWear received the Best Paper award at CHI2017 (top 1% of all submissions at CHI). The conference received over 2400 submissions and 24 were chosen for Best paper (97 were chosen for Honorable Mention). Congrats to lead student Majeed Kazemitibaar and the whole MakerWear team!
This is the first full research publication from Froehlich's NSF CAREER award.[read more]

Dr. Leah Findlater and I were just awarded a Google Faculty Research Award for our work on wearable sound awareness support for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing. This project, codenamed GlassEar, began as a collaboration back in 2014 with Dhruv Jain, then a visiting researcher and now an incoming PhD student.[read more]

I'm excited to announce that our group just received an NSF CAREER Award to develop and study new interfaces, techniques, and tools to enable young children (ages 5-10) to program, build, and use their own interactive wearables. I've been working on this project since about the time I arrived at UMD, and I'm so happy that it is now funded. Lab member (and MS student) Majeed Kazemitabaar has been absolutely critical in the past few years to making this project what it is today. Our first paper on this work will be published at CHI2017. Hope to see you there!
See also this UMIACS news release.[read more]

Project Sidewalk is now listed on citizenscience.gov (direct link). Citizenscience.gov is "an official government website designed to accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the U.S. government." Check it out![read more]